Ask: phone

Asking a user to provide a phone number is a delicate matter. The phone number must for instance be a valid phone number but can also often be entered in multiple ways, like with or without country code, dashes, etc. For this reason a separate ask node variant is available that is specific for eliciting phone numbers.

On voice channels, on older versions of the Base flows skill, this node variant will use DTMF to capture the phone number. On newer version it will try to capture the phone number using speech first and only fall back to DTMF when the first attempt didn't work. This way there is no risk of speech to text errors. Also, if the system already knows the user's phone number because it was provided to the system by the underlying phone system, the bot can use that number or at least give the user an option to do so.

When the phone number is asked in the context of a user, it can be stored in the predefined phone variable within the user object. This way, the phone number is also available in the Contacts, Inbox and Conversations section of the platform.

ask phone

Node properties

Property	Description	Explanation
Question	The original question
Try again (1)	The repeat question when wrong input is provided	optional
Try again (2)	An alternative repeat question when wrong input is provided	optional
After 3rd try	The flow to trigger after 3 times of unknown input.	optional
Assign to	To assign the result to a variable in the conversation
Remember in user.phone	To store also store the value in user.phone
Disable number validation	To ignore invalid ISO phone numbers	Can be relevant for bots that allow input of phone extensions (like 3 digit numbers)
Force mobile only	To force the user can only provide a mobile number	This option is important to use in combination with the Send whatsapp node variant.
DTMF only	Accepts only DTMF on phone channels. Otherwise it will try to accept speech first before falling back to DTMF	Only applicable on phone channels.
Use current number	How to deal with reusing the number that was provided by the phone system (caller id)	Use no if you always want to ask for the number. Use yes if you always want to reuse the number and use ask when you want the system to ask first.
Use existing	The question to use in case the above field is configured with ask
Retry	The repeat question to use in case no or wrong input was provided.

This node will also set a the user tag "user:phone", see the Settings → Tags page

Dialog triggers

Special events can trigger another flow or set of nodes in your existing flow using the so called Dialog Triggers. See the chapter Dialog triggers for more details.